A WikiLeaks Arms Race?

Earlier this month, Al Jazeera launched a new feature on its Web site called the Transparency Unit—the network’s in-house version of WikiLeaks. When the unit first went online, there was not much coverage about it in English, but that changed over the weekend when Al Jazeera announced that it had gained access to a large tranche of confidential documents, now being called the “Palestine Papers.” The papers appear to reveal internal diplomatic negotiations among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the United States, to further the peace process in the Middle East. (Al Jazeera has shared the documents with the Guardian, which has published extensive reporting on them.) In a previous post, I noted that WikiLeaks was increasingly adapting to the standards of conventional journalism in its editorial policy. The emergence of the Transparency Unit suggests that an opposite trend may also be slowly at work.

So far, Al Jazeera has not revealed much about the functionality of the Transparency Unit, except for a few details on its submissions page. The network promises that it has created a “secure terminal” for leaks. “All materials are encrypted while they are transmitted to us, and they remain encrypted on our servers,” it says. Al Jazeera also promises that anonymity will be maintained in a variety of ways. (It vows that the I.P. addresses of computers logging onto the site will not be recorded, and electronic documents will be scrubbed of identifying information after they are submitted.) And it encourages leakers to use Tor—a way to send information over the Internet that is difficult to trace—and to take measures to safeguard their material before they even submit it. These are things that WikiLeaks does, too. Publication of the Palestine Papers suggests that at least someone thought that Al Jazeera was secure enough to submit to it many internal documents about a highly incendiary issue.

Has Al Jazeera taken the first step in a journalism arms race to begin acquiring mass document leaks? It would be surprising if other large news organizations are not already at work on their own encrypted WikiLeaks-style portals. The New York Times and the Guardian, for instance, have every incentive to follow in Al Jazeera’s footsteps and give people a way to submit sensitive material directly to them rather than through an intermediary, such as WikiLeaks. If they aren’t doing this, they most likely will start doing it eventually, and this raises several questions: In a future where in-house WikiLeaks portals are common to mainstream news organizations, is there a role for the original site? Will Julian Assange’s creation become a victim of its own success? And if his movement is taken over by established news organizations, how might it change?

I haven’t worked out answers to all of this just yet, but here are some quick thoughts.

WikiLeaks is commonly thought of as a Web site that facilitates leaks, but it was founded with a secondary aim: to create a digital platform that cannot be censored. This other aim shaped some of the early editorial decisions that WikiLeaks made—for instance, publishing, in 2008, an alternate screenplay for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Critics have challenged WikiLeaks about its decision to publish the screenplay, asking: what is so noteworthy about such a leak? But its news value is not what was at issue. Last year, Assange told me that the screenwriter had wanted to make his work public and had even tried to post it online, because fans had expressed their unhappiness with the movie as it was finally released. “He was involved in a creativity dispute,” Assange recalled. “His I.S.P. then received a legal threat to have it removed—i.e., censored from the public record. Someone then gave it to us, because we are known to defend the public record as a publisher of last resort, and we released it as a counter-censorship action.”

Since the publication of the video “Collateral Murder,” in April (described in my Profile of Assange last year), WikiLeaks began forming highly complex partnerships with mainstream news organizations. The partnerships have obscured from view one of its main goals—to be “a publisher of last resort”—because news organizations like the Guardian increasingly appear to have helped shape the editorial choices that WikiLeaks has made about what to make public. With the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs, mainstream news organizations were the primary way for readers to find their way to the leaks and understand them. Likewise, WikiLeaks has been slow and careful in its release of the State Department cables, only doing so after media organizations have judged which cables they believe to be newsworthy. One can see how, in the future, such a relationship might move further in the direction of specialization, with WikiLeaks focussing on acquiring mass leaks, and news organizations vetting and publishing them. A WikiLeaks offshoot, OpenLeaks, soon to go online, claims that it will not publish documents at all.

Still, the trend toward specialization obscures an important fact: that WikiLeaks remains a publisher, and that it continues to make its leaks available on the resilient and difficult-to-censor digital platform that Assange created for it. Assange’s ability to publish gives the site leverage in its partnership with mainstream newspapers and magazines. WikiLeaks can set its own deadlines, and, in some respects, frame the way that leaks are initially handled. The remarkable coöperation among major news organizations in sharing the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and the State Department cables reflects their shared knowledge that one way or another Assange planned to put that material in the public domain. None of them could ever have full ownership of the scoop, and yet if something went wrong with a leak each paper would still be stuck with the full liability.

If news organizations have their own in-house WikiLeaks operations, would they be as inclined to coöperate? I’m not sure. Al Jazeera has shared the Palestine Papers with the Guardian, and it may be that mass document leaks are so complex that no single organization will ever want to shoulder the burden alone. It is also possible that this kind of coöperation is temporary, a reflection of the newness and initial discomfort that comes with working on a scale that is exceptional, and that a newsroom that is better geared for large database leaks will be less inclined to share them. I don’t know.

One thing is certain. In America, a news outlet that builds for itself an in-house unit like the one Al Jazeera has created would be working within greater legal constraints than WikiLeaks, but also with greater freedoms, too. WikiLeaks is an unconventional publisher without precedent that draws considerable power from its ability to exist in multiple legal jurisdictions: its diffuse nature is what helps make it so hard to censor (and also hold to account). By contrast, the New York Times draws its strength from its credibility and judgment—and also from its rootedness, and from its conventionality.

This difference has broad implications. To be fixed to a single jurisdiction means that the law holds a greater sway over you than it otherwise would. It means that you agree to certain legal limits on your behavior—and that these can only be changed through the mechanisms of government. The New York Times is not a wandering inhabitant of the world’s chaotic and interlinked digital landscapes. The paper exists, in a concrete sense, at the center of Manhattan, in a very real community, where the price for being constrained by statutes and by judicial precedent is that it gets to help shape such things, too. A legal attack on the New York Times would instantly create a precedent that would very likely apply to all of journalism in America. That is a powerful deterrent—one that is as much social and political as it is legal. In other words, yes, accountability limits the Times, but it also offers it protections—protections that WikiLeaks at the moment does not enjoy because, among other things, there is not enough public consensus on what it is and stands for.

If the WikiLeaks model were to grow beyond WikiLeaks—much in the way social networking outgrew its earliest online incarnations—and develop more fully within the ambit of conventional media, it is likely that it would change in a way that reflects the different sources of authority that a stateless publisher and a conventional news organization each draw upon. Some aspects of Assange’s initial vision might get lost. Others, such as the site’s ability to publish things that no one confined to single jurisdiction can publish, might become more valuable. To be honest, I haven’t fully thought through what that change would mean. (If you want to share your ideas, contact me.) But for the moment, no matter what the outcome, it is hard not to expect greater convergence between old and new media in a way that will strengthen the journalistic project overall.